I was reading Web Optimist’s blog on being penalised for someone else’s paid links (which isn’t very optimistic!) and I had to read it through a couple of times to get the gist of what he was saying.
This is the paragraph that caused me to pause
“This is where Google’s minus 60 penalty appears to be unjust. It has the potential of penalizing the innocent. Say someone linking to you has bought text links and Google penalizes them. That means you are going to indirectly be penalized as well because that #1 link to you is now at #61. If several sites linking to you get penalized, it could really hurt.”
Whilst that’s true in essence I’m not sure where the unjust bit comes into it. The World Wide Web is a whole network of links, which is the basis of many of Google’s ranking factors. Every link has a value, and the fact that one has been devalued is just another element in the process of SEO. Links get devalued for lots of reasons, and sometimes they even get removed. It surely isn’t a shock horror moment for most SEO experts to know that the link building process is an ongoing one to replace dead links and increase the number overall.
Web Optimist also talks about ways to use this penalty to drop rankings for competitors, but it seems a bit involved, even though there are some out there in some industries who are into SEO skulduggery. Joe’s blog post about reverse SEO details some ways we have observed being used, and there are a few more out there should you care to dig.
One of the things that a good SEO company wwill do is advise you of any vulnerabilities they discover in the course of their work that could be utilised to penalise you.
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